SNOW struck Britain today and the Met Office have warned it could be the coldest night of the winter so far as “wintery hazards” threaten to cause chaos across the nation.

Met Office meteorologists Aidan McGivern and Alex Deakin warned of dangerous weather conditions across the UK over the next 24 hours. Mr Deakin pointed to a photo of a snow-covered street in Glasgow and said: “A lot of the scenes are like this and just a light covering in places and not causing mass disruption and not creating any school closures or anything like that. And that is the kind of snow that we are going to continue to see."

“Now, these showers are at low levels and are rain, sleet, hail – a proper mixture of what we call wintery showers.

“Above around 200m, so above the hills in the west, snowfall and snow building up.”

“It is not going to be widespread disruptive snow for London in the rush hour but it could be one of those where it started raining and it gets heavier and you see big flakes of snow falling from the sky and maybe even settling on some grassy bits, particularly if you are a bit higher over the Chilterns or whatever.”

But the Met Office forecaster warned the “greater issue” after the snow clears is the ice, which threatens to cause slippery surfaces across the south-east of the UK.

Mr Deakin then warned it could be the coldest night in Britain so far this year with temperatures dropping as low as -10C.

BBC Weather has also warned some parts of the UK will be hit with “prolific” wintry showers on Tuesday evening as the powerful weather system packing snow, sleet, thunder and lightning sweeps across the country.

The forecaster claimed Britain will also be hit by another weather system on Wednesday before temperatures plummet on Sunday.

The BBC Weather forecaster said: “We will still have a lot of wintry showers, to start the night, the temperature will drop like a rock as soon as sun sets and we are going to see again ice on untreated surfaces and also some freezing fog, especially northwest England and southern Scotland, but not exclusively necessarily.

“As we move into tomorrow we start off with wintry showers in coastal counties to the east and will hang onto them on and off through the day. Like today they are showers, so not all of us will catch them.

“Drier interludes behind them, but you can see too another system coming into the west which will introduce more cloud and some drizzle and some patchy light rain, and the showers continue across the north and the west.”

The BBC Weather forecaster claimed temperatures were expected to pick up on Thursday and Friday before “temperatures drop once again on Sunday”.